NHRA Top Fuel - Army Duo Separated By Just 65 Points Headed
To Championship Showdown

POMONA, Nov. 7, 2012: Considering leadership goes hand-in-hand with all
things U.S. Army, it’s no surprise the NHRA Full Throttle Drag Racing
Series Top Fuel championship heads to this weekend’s season-ending
Auto Club NHRA Finals at Auto Club Raceway in Pomona, Calif., with a U.S.
Army driving duo occupying the top two spots in the standings.

After all, the Army is the Nation’s preeminent leadership
experience, where the Nation’s future leaders are developed and are
empowered with the confidence to take decisive action when needed and the
flexibility to excel in constantly evolving situations.

It took a near-perfect penultimate round at Las Vegas two weekends ago
for seven-time Top Fuel champ Tony “The Sarge” Schumacher and
his U.S. Army Dragster to pull within 65 points of his championship-leading
Don Schumacher Racing teammate Antron Brown and the Matco Tools/U.S. Army
team.

Schumacher more than halved Brown’s 136-point lead in the
standings at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway by blazing to a top
qualifying effort and then advancing all the way to the final round of
eliminations. Brown, meanwhile, fought electrical gremlins throughout the
weekend and was eliminated in the first round for only the third time in 22
events this season.

A similar combination of occurrences at Pomona would give Schumacher his
eighth career Top Fuel title while Brown is in the driver’s seat and
can earn his first career championship by exhibiting the speed and
consistency that has netted a series-high six wins and five runner-up
finishes thus far this season. Brown can clinch the title by scoring 86
points of a possible 150 available this weekend.

Overcoming sizeable points deficits en route to the Top Fuel crown,
however, is certainly nothing new for Schumacher, who won his first Top
Fuel title in 1999 and then rattled of six consecutive championships from
2004 through 2009. In 2006, he trailed Doug Kalitta by 45 points heading to
Pomona but won the event thanks to a record-setting pass in the final round
to cleared the title by 14 points. It was particularly satisfying as the
U.S. Army team overcame a 336-point deficit at the season’s midpoint.
In 2007, Schumacher trailed Rod Fuller by 68 points heading to Pomona, but
Fuller was eliminated in the first round and Schumacher won the event once
again and finished 19 points ahead for the championship.

In all, Schumacher has six career wins at Pomona to tie him with the
legendary “Big Daddy” Don Garlits as the winningest drivers at
Auto Club Raceway. Schumacher and Garlits also were the winningest Top Fuel
drivers at the U.S. Nationals with eight victories apiece before Schumacher
won his ninth career event at Lucas Oil Raceway in Indianapolis this past
September.

This weekend, Schumacher knows full well that emerging from Pomona with
championship number eight will take a level of engineering and teamwork by
his U.S. Army team that reflects the Army’s leading-edge technology
and the powerful, realistic training of its Army Strong Soldiers. It almost
worked to perfection two weekends ago at Las Vegas. Now, it’s time to
go one better and then hope for the best.

TONY “THE SARGE” SCHUMACHER, driver of the U.S. Army Top
Fuel Dragster:

Your seven championships have come a number of different ways, but it
looks like this year has been the most competitive the series has ever
been. How does this year’s championship chase compare to the
others?

“I think, and I’ve said it all along, this is the best class
of cars that has ever been put together. And I don’t believe
I’ve ever been more proud to be representing the U.S. Army in this
competitive environment. As I’ve also said all along, only the
strongest wear our colors, and the U.S. Army Soldiers we represent possess
a mental, emotional and physical strength like no other. Likewise, the U.S.
Army team reflects those strengths. That said, there are more great cars
than we’ve ever seen –great drivers, great teams. We seem to
have all settled into a pretty good home between the drivers and the crew
chiefs, and the battles are incredible. There are nine or 10 cars that are
extremely good. The guy who stands on the podium at the end is going to be
well-deserving of the Full Throttle championship. That’s it. Because
it has been as difficult as anything I’ve ever seen, I’ve had
to drive better. Antron (Brown), Spencer (Massey), all of us have had to
drive better. All the drivers with the experience have had to rise way
beyond what we’ve had to rise to before. And experience is paying off
right now. It is incredible. I told the guys last weekend, it has been a
number of years since we’ve seen something so good, such high class
of racing. We’re not seeing games played on the starting line,
we’re seeing good, solid, wicked, difficult races.”

Does this particular run for the championship compare to any of your
past championships?

“A couple of them. I mean, I came back from 336 points the year
before the Countdown. That was simply amazing. It wasn’t nine cars,
but (Doug) Kalitta was so hard to beat. And then, when I showed up at
Pomona in ’07, I was in fourth place and I think I was 65 or 70
points out of the lead. To win that, not only did the points leader have to
go out first round, but I had to get around, I think, (Brandon) Bernstein
and (Larry) Dixon, and Antron had been up in the points pretty good for
most of that year, too, where he was at last year. But it was incredible. I
have lived some great moments, and I can only say that. At the end of my
career, I will be able to look back and think, there have been very few
years that haven’t been extremely gratifying. This will be at the top
of the list if we can pull this off. Or if Antron does it or if Spencer
does it, I will guarantee you, because theirs is going to be a first.
It’s going to be incredibly gratifying for the amount of work and
dedication they had to put into this year.”

You seem to be at your best at this time every year. What is it about
crunch time that enables you to be so successful?

“I absolutely love the end of the year. The last eight runs, the
last two race weekends, have always been our best. They’ve been the
ones where you had to win, and we’ve performed the best for whatever
reason. In the beginning, I always said if you want to see me drop the
ball, take the pressure away because I let my guard down. But when
it’s time to be really, really good, we’re good at that. I
think it’s kind of funny we’re 65 points off. I’ve showed
up at Pomona 45 points back, we went to the semis and we still won. Now,
it’s 65 points and it’s like we needed something new, a little
more of a challenge. The end of the year is what it’s all about, what
we race all year for. It’s what we expect to be good at and
we’re required to be good at. I always wanted the ball in my hands
for the last shot, and I always wanted to sit in a seat and have to win to
be the champ, not hope someone else loses. I think Antron is in a really
good spot right now. He’s ahead of us, but he’s not that kind
of guy. He does not want to have to watch someone lose, he wants to close
the deal, just like we do. At the awards banquet, we all want to be on that
stage. It used to be there were one or two good cars and everyone else was
fighting for third and fourth. It’s different. There are a lot of
great cars. But this is a pressure cooker. This is what it’s all
about.”

ANTRON BROWN, driver of the Matco Tools/U.S. Army Top Fuel Dragster:

You’ve had a solid year and are in position to win your first
career Top Fuel title. Talk about how the year has gone as we head to the
season finale.

“At the beginning of the year, everybody is kind of just jelling.
Everybody is trying to get in their groove. That’s what our team did.
It’s like the U.S. Army preparing for battle – each and member
of our team plays a vital role in the success of the car on the track, just
like every Soldier, no matter which of the more than 150 career options he
or she chooses in the Army, is vital to the success of the mission We were
just working hard at it and we were just trying to come up with a
consistent, fast package to go along and compete with the cars that we have
because, if you look at the competition we have in our class this year,
everybody is in the 70s (3.70-second range). Everybody. Before, there were
like four cars that could run 70 – our three (Don Schumacher Racing)
cars and maybe the Al Anabi car. And now you have over 10 teams that can
run 70s. That tells you the difference of how everything just stepped up
this year, especially once we got into the Countdown. And when we go into
this last race, we’ve set ourselves up with a chance to win it all.
We are going in better than we did last year. Last year we went 18 points
behind. This year we’re going in with a points lead and our main deal
is we want to race here. I want to do what we did in (Las) Vegas and do it
all over again in Pomona. I want to race. So we’ll go out there and
try to qualify well, and I just want to be competitive throughout the whole
event and just go into race day taking it one round at a time like we did
all year long, and that’s what we’re shooting for. We stayed
out (in Las Vegas) and tested Monday, and we made four great runs in
testing, and we just want to carry that on to Pomona so we can continue
with Tony and Spencer, Langdon and the rest of the whole field because we
don’t have to worry about each other anymore. That’s what we
did at the beginning of the year – we just worried about each other
because, when you look at the stats, the only people we lost to in those
were our own teammates. Now, you see in these later rounds everybody else
is definitely picking up the slack, and they’ve been taking us out.
They’ve been taking each and every one of us out, being very
competitive, and they’re right there. That’s just how tough our
class has gotten.”

Much is made of how Tony Schumacher and his team seem to thrive on the
pressure of the final event weekends. What are your thoughts on that?

“Yeah, and the thing about it is me and Tony go back a ways with
this deal, even when I wasn’t racing Top Fuel. One thing about it is,
up at the Don Schumacher camp, when I was racing Pro Stock Motorcycle, I
watched Tony win numerous championships, come from behind, dominate, won 15
races one season. And my deal was always that I was a student. I always sat
back and looked, trying to learn what makes these people so great. This guy
is making history all the time. You wonder what is it that he’s got
over everybody else? And then, when you see him talk, like we always do at
meet-and-greets, he goes through his epic stories and talks about his
battles out there and what he and his team have achieved, and the one thing
you can see is that he lives for those moments. Like, when the pressure is
on, how do you rise to the occasion? If you ask him how he looks at the
high-pressure stakes and the pressure situation, he says, ‘I just do
what I do. I go in and give it all I’ve got – nothing more,
nothing less.”

You had some serious momentum going before you went out in the first
round at Las Vegas. How tough was that?

“It was a little disheartening because we struggled all through
qualifying and we got our first lap down the track and everything was fine.
We weren’t very aggressive. We just wanted to go A to B and,
afterward, we had some electrical problems and we had it fixed at the
Friday-night session because it burnt our computer out of our car, and it
continued on Saturday. So we actually found out what the root cause of it
was, we replaced everything on our car, and we came out for first round and
we had a brand new part malfunction where our control module box just
didn’t work, and we had no clutch. So we stepped on the gas and the
clutch never moved, so we lost first round. It was one of those fluke deals
where all these things were going wrong. We were still just trying to fight
to stay there. We wanted to race. When we went out first round, it kind of
took a little wind out of our sails because that’s the worst feeling
in the world just to sit there and watch everybody else race and collect
points. We know how great our teammates are. We know how great their cars
are. We know how good their teams are. We know what kind of drivers they
are. Tony is a seven-time world champ. Spencer has been there running for
the championship each and every year. He just missed it last year by like
two-thousandths of a second to be a world champ. We know how good they are,
and to sit on the sidelines and watch them race and you’re out and
you can’t do anything about it, everybody else was there watching the
drama just looking at us and saying, ‘Are you hoping your teammates
to go out?’ No, I want my teammates to go out and race, and if they
get beat, they get beat. I’d rather be out there racing with them and
controlling my own destiny rather than looking at other people
race.”